Humor in Selected Dubbed and Subtitled English Animated Movies: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

As for the main argument of the thesis, a number of considerations have been observed. First, dubbing is more effective than subtitling in transferring linguistic humor but it is as ineffective as subtitling in rendering cultural humor. It has been demonstrated that out of 60 instances of linguistic humor, subtitling failed to render 50 and reproduced only 10 whereas dubbing failed to render 28, reproduced 32. As for the 25 instances of cultural humor, both dubbing and subtitling failed to reproduce more than 70% of instances that combine cultural references. In general, both dubbing and subtitling show ineffectiveness in transferring humorous elements in ST recording low percentage of total successful transference. Even in the case of strong performance of dubbing in translating linguistic humor, the percentage of translation loss reaches 46.5 %. However, such differences in successful transference percentages are not attributed to technicalities of the two modalities which have been of no significance to the translation of humor techniques included in the analysis. The limitations and advantages of subtitling and dubbing affect the translation of only some instances of audiovisual